Oakland man stuck in Yemen fights to return

OAKLAND -- The bedroom above Gateway Liquors where Rayman Hussein used to live is gathering dust. The Oak-Town Fashion store where he sold throwback jerseys and hoodies is padlocked shut.

Hussein has been stuck for more than a year in Yemen, his birthplace, unable to return to his American life. U.S. Embassy officials in the Middle Eastern country confiscated his passport, stranding the naturalized U.S. citizen, a 30-year-old alumnus of Berkeley High School and San Francisco State University.

"I feel like my life has stopped for 18 months," Hussein said by phone from Yemen this week. "There are no words to express how bad I feel."

A customer enters Gateway Liquor on San Pablo Avenue on the corner of 60th Street in Oakland, Calif., on Friday, Jan. 23, 2014. (Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)

His legal quest to get back to Oakland has resonated in the Yemeni-American community and is shaking up a U.S. consular bureau not used to such outspoken criticism. Many Yemeni immigrants say they are frustrated about being a constant target of federal suspicion.

Hussein thought he was traveling to a routine bureaucratic appointment on Jan. 27, 2013, when he drove four hours with his wife and toddler son from their mountainside hometown of Ibb to the U.S. Embassy in Sanaa, Yemen's capital.

He had flown to Yemen in 2012 in hopes of obtaining a "consular report of birth abroad" that would allow his son, Haitham, to join him in Oakland. The boy turns 4 years old in May.

After waiting months for the appointment, Hussein said he was stunned when American officials in Sanaa began aggressively accusing him of identity fraud and, at the end of the day, took his passport.

"They interrogated me and my wife, taking us to separate rooms for hours," he said. "They asked me questions about my family. ... They even threatened me that I would go to jail."

Hussein, who was 10 when he moved to the United States in 1993, hoped that his son could settle in the Bay Area before kindergarten. Arriving so young, he said, eases the difficulties of adjusting and learning English that grow more challenging with age.

"It was hard for me at 10 years old," Hussein said. "I would rather have my son start school in the U.S. and be ready for college, and make sure he does better than me."

He had been freely traveling back and forth from Oakland to Ibb since getting married in his native city in 2005 -- an international commute not uncommon for Yemeni-American men in the Bay Area. His wife is also a U.S. citizen but stayed in Yemen as Hussein completed his political science degree, drove a taxi cab and worked at his family's Oakland stores.

Alhareth Hussein, 17, is seen at his father Abdul Hussein's Gateway Liquor store on San Pablo Avenue on the corner of 60th Street in Oakland, Calif., on Friday, Jan. 23, 2014.
(Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)

The family is among many in the Bay Area with roots in Ibb, a lush mountainous region that has shipped waves of farmers, grocers and shopkeepers to California for more than a half-century.

"One of the characteristics of the Yemeni community is we go back and forth a lot," said Alameda resident Mokhtar Alkhanshali, an advocate for the local chapter of the Muslim American Society. "When they take your passport away, they're essentially taking away your right to citizenship, your right to travel."

Hussein is not the only Yemeni-American to claim his passport was unjustly confiscated at the Sanaa embassy, but he is the first to take his grievances public. Now, word of his saga has inspired dozens of other Yemeni-Americans to contact lawyers with similar claims. Civil rights groups are asking U.S. officials for an investigation into the behavior of the U.S. diplomatic corps in Yemen, and Hussein and others began receiving notices in December notifying them of a chance to appeal.

A U.S. State Department spokesman in Washington, D.C., refused to comment about Hussein, noting the confidentiality of individual cases, but he denied Wednesday that there were any broader problems at the Sanaa embassy. Consular officials have a right to revoke passports for a host of reasons, and passport fraud is a global problem, he said.

Abdul Hussein, owner of Gateway Liquor, and originally from Yemen, is photographed in front of the building he owns on San Pablo Avenue on the corner of 60th Street in Oakland, Calif., on Friday, Jan. 23, 2014. ( Jane Tyska/Bay Area News Group)

But a 2009 diplomatic cable leaked to the WikiLeaks group and an unclassified 2010 embassy inspection reveal the high level of suspicion with which diplomats treat Yemenis seeking immigration documents. Fraud is so rampant, the leaked cable said, that all claims "are considered fraudulent until proven otherwise."

Years of violent turmoil in Yemen -- one of the poorest Arab countries, a place that terrorists have found ripe for recruitment and a target of U.S. drone attacks -- have made American officials cautious. But advocates believe officials trying to root out threats are also hurting many innocent Yemeni-Americans.

It took nearly a year before American officials offered Hussein a formal explanation, and only after a San Francisco legal group filed a public records request and demanded Hussein get an appeal hearing. A letter from the U.S. government said that by declaring himself Rayman Ali Hussein on his passport, the 30-year-old was falsely identifying himself. Missing was a fourth, tribal surname that reflects where he is from -- but which Hussein doesn't consider part of his legal name.

Hussein said the name on his passport was correct, and it is the same name he has used on American documents since he first moved to California two decades ago.

"The charge, aside from being baseless, is illogical," said his lawyer, Yaman Salahi of San Francisco-based Advancing Justice Asian Law Caucus. "It would mean he committed fraud at the age of 10."

U.S. officials say Hussein signed a sworn statement admitting the falsehood. Hussein said he did so under duress.

"I feel like they are discriminating against us," Hussein said. "I'm not saying they are not supposed to investigate fraud. All I'm saying is, 'Give me my right as an American citizen, to travel, to go back to the U.S. Treat me like other Americans.'"

U.S. officials in recent days told Hussein and others with confiscated passports that they might be granted permission to return to the United States, but Salahi said that is of little solace to Hussein "if it means he has to leave his 3-year-old son behind." Hussein is waiting to hear if the boy can get a "certificate of identity" allowing him to fly to San Francisco and assert his right to citizenship.

As he fights to return, Hussein said he misses the gritty block of San Pablo Avenue where his extended family has lived -- and made a living -- for decades.

"Oakland to me is home," he said.

His oldest uncle, a merchant seaman, moved to San Francisco in the 1960s. Another uncle, Abdul, followed in the early 1970s, and in the mid-1980s he bought an old commercial block in North Oakland near the Berkeley border, founding the Gateway Liquor store and settling his family in the residential units above it. On a recent evening, a pair of Hussein's cousins worked inside the cramped convenience store as some younger cousins sped down the sidewalk on scooters.

As he scanned his smart phone for a photo of his nephew, his uncle, the shopkeeper, said family members and neighborhood customers are awaiting the return of an upright man who has a lot of promise. Abdul Hussein said he understands the fears of American counterterrorism officials "because the world is going crazy, but you have to get the right person."

"Everybody knows him here," he said of his nephew. "We're from a good family, and this is our home."